February 25, 2013

Under the blind leadership of Leo Apotheker, HP's brilliant move into tablets with WebOS was yanked out of existence after only being in the market for 30 days. Under Meg Whitman, HP is back into the tablet business. The announcement was made in Barcelona late yesterday at the Mobile World Congress event that runs until Thursday. HP is moving back into the market very aggressively with a new 7 inch tablet that will begin to roll out in April. But there was also some fascinating news about WebOS that will be officially announced at some point in the next few hours or days. Report Updated February 25 at 1:50 PM MST.

HP's new 7 inch tablet is being priced aggressively at $169 as a way to get consumers attention. And it will with specifications that include a dual-core 1.6 gigahertz ARM processor, 8 gigabytes of memory, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Unlike Amazon's Kindle and some other players in this space, HP's tablets will fit into a much larger ecosystem of devices serving both consumer and enterprise markets. On that basis alone, HP's tablets are bound to be appreciated by their customer base.

Last week CEO Meg Whitman stated that the market was moving to a multi-OS world. This was likely a reference to HP adopting Intel's Haswell processor due this summer allowing devices to run more than one operating system. HP's new tablet will run Google's Android. A Hybrid Ultrabook Convertible due out later this year will be able to technically run both Windows 8 and Android as a way to lure consumers to a multi-OS solution.

LG to Adopt WebOS for Future Smart TVs

Last week Patently Apple posted a report about HP having received a granted patent for their WebOS. Today, there may be news surfacing about LG adopting WebOS for future Smart TVs. The original report that surfaced earlier this morning and then removed at CNET was that LG will be acquiring WebOS from HP for an undisclosed amount. What has to be confirmed is whether LG is licensing WebOS or purchasing it outright.

With never ending rumors about Apple moving into the Smart TV arena in the future and LG wanting to compete with Samsung TVs using Android, LG is looking to protect their HDTV sales and deliver next generation services and experiences for LG customers in the coming years.

More Details Emerge

After our report was posted, new details have emerged. The Vergehas reported the very latest details pertaining to some of the HP-LG deal particulars for webOS.

"According to HP COO Bill Veghte, LG will acquire the source code, documentation, websites, and team behind the client side of webOS, but HP will retain the entire cloud services division — that's the App Catalog, updating system, and other backend services that interact with webOS. We see this as an opportunity to broaden our reach in delivering services to customers on a variety of plaforms," said Veghte. Most importantly, HP sees an opportunity to bring an app-store-like experience to large business customers who use cloud-based apps. "We can use this very broadly in our enterprise services organization," said Veghte, noting that these customers can deploy apps with tighter update and access policies in place using the technology."

What's more, Patel reports, LG's plans include the possibility of eventually producing a phone or other mobile devices that run webOS, although the company remains focused on televisions in the short term.